As a child, I dreamed of the sight of fine uniforms and the glory of the guns. Now, I only remember... Who am I, you ask, who speaks so foolishly? Let me tell you of the things that I remember...

I was a young man from Boston, just seventeen years of age. I was lying behind the ramparts on the slopes of one of the small hills out beyond the bluffs. The stench of the battleground was so overpowering: the powder smoke, the sweat of fear, and the sickly sweet odor of blood. Clear thought was impossible through the constant roar of the musketry and the cries of the wounded and the dying. But I remember...

Later, as a young volunteer from Tennessee, I was once more crouched behind a barricade. Only this time it was near New Orleans and I was firing at the soldiers of the king. This time I was not a rebel. The crash of the cannon was deafening and I was so afraid. I remember...

Later still, amid the green hills and fields of Pennsylvania, the cannon spoke again. My friends, NO! my brothers! in blue and gray lay maimed and dying...by my hand. To preserve the Union, to stop the enslavement of others of my brothers, I died that day at Cemetery Ridge near Gettysburg. My God, I do remember...

But it never stopped. Long years later in the forests of the Meuse Argonne, at Soissons, Chateau Thierrey... "The poppies grow between the crosses, row on row, that mark our place." Oh, how I remember.

That war, like all others, did not end war. In the heat of North Africa, lying in the sand of Kasserine Pass; jammed in a rusted out compartment deep within the old "Arizona" beneath the oily water of Pearl Harbor; hanging on a strand of barbed wire at a place called Omaha Beach; rotting in an island jungle; frozen in the snow at Bastogne. I truly do remember...

And yet again...frozen corpses stacked like cordwood at the Chosin Reservoir; shivering in the blood soaked ground at the Pusan Perimeter; falling in a plume of black smoke from a sky called Mig Alley; and watching bobbing bodies in the surf at Inchon. I'll always remember...

And last; Oh, please let it be the last! The stinking jungles of the Delta; the siege of Khe Sanh; Tet; Hue; Pleiku. The shriek of Phantoms over Hanoi, Laos, Cambodia. The pits and cages of the jungle prisons. The Hanoi Hilton. Me...Missing in Action! Me...dead and forgotten...

But it never ends and it will never be the last! Grenada! Panama! Gulf War I! Gulf War II! Fallujah and Baghdad! Car bombs! I.E.D.s! Our young men and women. Maimed and dying. The young and the brave. Your children...your husbands and wives...your family and friends...Americans.

If only I could forget; but I never will. And again you ask who I am? Why, I am an American fighting man and woman! I serve in the forces that protect our country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense...and I have.

Please, don't wait for Memorial Day to remember me. Your barbecue, your auto race, your family picnic to the mountains or the beach, or your own back yard are far too important to be disturbed by thoughts of me. Now is the time, if only for a brief instant, please think of me....and the price I paid. Remember with me, for to forget me is to doom us all to, once again and forever, keep paying the price for complacency, arrogance, and over confidence.